Code black

Last October, South Korea issued a “code black” travel ban on parts of Cambodia and sent a high-level team to extricate Korean nationals trapped in cybercrime compounds—forced to work against their will. South Korean National Security Adviser Wi Sung-lac said intelligence services believed more than 1,000 citizens might be held in such compounds. A case from last summer sharpened the urgency: Criminals allegedly lured a South Korean student to Cambodia with the promise of well-paid work, then kidnapped, extorted, tortured, and killed him.

In January, Cambodia arrested Chinese-born Chen Zhi, chair of the Prince Group and alleged leader of one of Asia’s largest cybercrime syndicates, and sent him to China for trial. That followed months of pressure—not just from South Korea but from the United States and the United Kingdom, which sanctioned the Prince Group last October.

Since July, Cambodian police have targeted 250 cybercrime centers, claiming to have shut down roughly 200 of them—about 80 percent—and arrested nearly 700 alleged ringleaders. Prime Minister Hun Manet has pledged to eliminate all remaining compounds by the end of April. But independent verification remains scarce, and hundreds of sites may still operate. It’s an enormous industry. The United Nations reported in 2023 that some 100,000 trafficked people labored involuntarily in Cambodia’s cybercrime industry; in Burma, the number likely exceeded 130,000. How could it get this big?

Jacob Sims is a journalist and visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center. Sims says the cybercrime industry has grown so dominant in the Mekong region mainly because criminal syndicates have forged close working relationships with ruling regimes. Cambodia is a stark example: A ruling elite that seized control of the country’s political and economic institutions maintains its hold on power by going into business with criminal networks. The partnership works, Sims says, because it fits neatly with the elite’s longstanding business model—extracting rents from illicit and predatory industries.

But now Cambodia’s elites have had to recalibrate. The Thai military inflicted severe blows on Cambodian forces in the recent war, partly because no one would help a mafia-style regime like Cambodia’s. And then came pressure from South Korea, China, Britain, America, and others, who threatened to impose sanctions on regime insiders. This is forcing Cambodia’s rulers to crack down on some cybercrime syndicates—and yet the crackdown itself might be an elaborate way of covering up the sheer extent of the regime’s own complicity …

Gustav Jönsson: How big is the Southeast Asian cybercrime industry?

Jacob Sims: Scamming is an illicit economy that likely rivals the global drug trade. Depending on who’s offering the estimate, you’re looking at somewhere between US$500 billion and a trillion a year in scams and fraud. Southeast Asia has the densest concentration in the world—somewhere between 10 and 25 percent of that global volume takes place there. You frequently hear numbers like $50 to $80 to $100 billion a year for scams originating from Cambodia, Burma, and Laos. In these countries, scamming is industrial-scale. And highly sophisticated transnational crime syndicates carry it out in collaboration with politically connected local elites.